SEATTLE — Temperature records were broken multiple days in a row earlier this week in a heat wave that settled over western Washington.
SeaTac, Seattle, Olympia and Bellingham set daily temperature records Tuesday, which was projected to be the hottest day of western Washington's recent heat wave.
Olympia cracked the triple digits, registering a high temperature of 100 degrees. The previous high-temperature record of 95 was set back in 1985.
SeaTac observed a high of 98 degrees, breaking the previous record of 93 set back in 2010. This cracked the top 10 for warmest days ever recorded at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, coming in at ninth on the list.
RELATED: Western Washington forecast
Now with summer in full swing, will we see a year like 2022 when the Seattle area hit 90 degrees 13 times and broke the all-time record? Or will we see a cooler-than-normal summer in 2024?
To find out we reached out to our in-house experts and asked them for their predictions.
Below, presented alphabetically, our KING 5 meteorologists shared their best guesses on how many 90-degree days Seattle will record this summer.
Adam Claibon: 5 days
My reasoning behind only five days is that we are coming out of an El Nino winter. The last time that happened (2018/2019), our following summer (2019) only had two days in the 90s. The summer after that (2020) only had four days in the 90s - more of a neutral year. And the majority of those that hit the 90s were in July or earlier.
Mike Everett: 10 days
I'm going to go big and say 10.
I hope I'm wrong and that the actual number is significantly less.
The good news is that we have wrapped up El Niño - the ENSO cycle that soaked the Southwest and kept the PNW warmer and drier than normal while limiting our snowpack.
We are about to enter a "neutral" phase before returning to La Niña conditions later this year. This "neutral" phase should theoretically keep us from getting too hot this summer. Continued El Niño conditions would have been brutal.
But! A lot of the historical data we pull from is becoming increasingly unreliable as weather patterns are changing faster than we can keep up with them. Stronger and more frequent visits from atmospheric river events are a prime example.
Leah Pezzetti: 6 days
This is an interesting question. Here's my thought process: the chances of hitting 90 degrees at SEA multiple times are definitely high. We look a lot at historical data when we have conversations like this. In the last 20 years, we've dodged that threshold just two times, so the chance of hitting 90 or warmer zero times feels low.
But we also still have the summer of 2022 fresh on our minds, when we broke the record for the most times we'd ever recorded 90 or warmer (we hit it 13 times). I think we still have the sticker shock of that top of mind. But that was smack in the middle of back-to-back El Niño years, so the record heat makes sense given the big-picture conditions.
We're expected to transition to a La Niña pattern by the fall, so the heat should back off compared to the last few summers. That being said, our conditions have been trending warmer and drier overall, so that makes me keep my guess on the relatively higher side.
Ashley Ruiz: 7 or 8 days
I'm thinking closer to seven or eight times, only because we've already hit 90 four times. I hope I'm wrong. El Niño is over and we're currently in a neutral phase, heading for La Niña. The PNW won't feel the effects of La Niña until the winter.
Climatologically, a neutral phase would keep us from getting too hot. If we had back-to-back El Niño winters or if we were still in El Niño, I would go even higher.
The summer outlook still calls for above-normal temperatures and below-normal rainfall, but this does not mean relentless heat and bone-dry conditions for three months straight.
